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Merkel rejects calls to change Germany's refugee policy after attacks Angela Merkel defends Germany's refugee policy after attacks
(about 2 hours later)
Angela Merkel has rejected calls to reverse her welcoming stance towards refugees after a series of brutal attacks in the country. Angela Merkel has delivered a staunch defence of her open door policy towards refugees, insisting she feels no guilt over a series of violent attacks in Germany and was right to allow hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees to arrive last summer.
The German chancellor told reporters the assailants “wanted to undermine our sense of community, our openness and our willingness to help people in need. We firmly reject this.” “A rejection of the humanitarian stance we took could have led to even worse consequences,” the German chancellor said, adding that the assailants “wanted to undermine our sense of community, our openness and our willingness to help people in need. We firmly reject this.”
Merkel, who interrupted a summer holiday at her cottage north of Berlin to give a press conference in the capital, told reporters four assaults within a week were “shocking, oppressive and depressing” but not a sign that authorities had lost control. Repeating her infamous “wir schaffen das” – we can manage it – mantra, delivered last summer at the peak of the refugee crisis, Merkel said: “I didn’t say it would be easy.”
“Taboos of civilisation are being broken,” she said, referring to a series of deadly attacks in France, Belgium, Turkey and the US state of Florida as well as Germany. “These acts happened in places where any of us could have been.” “I said back then, and I’ll say it again, Germany is a strong country. I called it a task for the whole nation. But just as we’ve managed so much already, we’ll manage this.”
She repeated her rallying cry from last year when she opened the borders to people fleeing war and persecution, many from Syria, which brought nearly 1.1 million migrants and refugees to the country in 2015. Within the space of a week, Germany has been rocked by an axe attack on a train, a mass shooting in Munich that left nine dead, a machete attack in which a pregnant woman was killed and a suicide bomb in Ansbach.
“I am still convinced today that ‘we can do it’ – it is our historic duty and this is a historic challenge in times of globalisation,” she said. “We have already achieved very, very much in the last 11 months.” Three of the attacks were carried out by refugees, and two of them – the axe attack in Würzburg in which four people were injured, and the suicide bombing in Ansbach – are believed to have an extremist motive.
Germany has been rocked by a wave of attacks, including a mass shooting in Munich that left nine dead, an axe attack on a train in which four people were seriously injured, a machete attack in which a pregnant woman was murdered, and a suicide bomb blast in which 12 people were injured. The teenager who carried out the Munich shooting, meanwhile, was a German-Iranian who prided himself on sharing a birthday with Adolf Hitler and appeared to have targeted foreigners.
Three of the four attackers were asylum seekers, and two of the assaults were claimed by Islamic State. Thursday’s press conference, which was brought forward by a month so Merkel could confront critics who have accused her of being too silent on the security threats facing Germany, was dominated by the attacks, which she called “shocking, oppressive and depressing”.
While the German political class has largely called for calm, opposition parties and rebels from Merkel’s own conservative bloc have accused her of exposing the country to an unacceptable level of risk without stricter controls on new arrivals. While insisting Germany would remain open to those in need of asylum, the chancellor acknowledged that the so-called Islamic State terror group had sought to take advantage of the refugee influx.
“Islamist terrorism has unfortunately arrived in Bavaria,” the state’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said on Thursday, renewing calls by his Christian Social Union party for an upper limit on new asylum seekers let into Germany. “We are awaiting urgent action from the federal government and Europe – now is the time to act.” Isis “used the refugee movement to smuggle terrorist forces [into Europe], as we’ve seen in France”, Merkel told the annual press conference. “That we should check all the ways [they use] has been clear for a long time, which is why internal and external security can no longer be distinguished from each other. We unfortunately have to accept that many Islamist fighters from Europe have gone to Syria.”
Appearing resolute and unruffled by the events of recent days, Merkel insisted authorities were carrying out detailed analysis of the attacks, and would announce concrete measures that would be taken as a result of them.
She also outlined a nine-point plan to increase security in Germany, and said she recognised how fearful people were about their personal safety. “We’re doing everything humanly possible to ensure security in Germany,” she said, acknowledging the “huge degree of insecurity people feel as a result of the recent events, that people are scared”. But, she said, “fear cannot be a counsel for political action”.
Following the Ansbach suicide attack perpetrated by a 27-year-old Syrian, political leaders in Bavaria declared that “Islamic terrorism has finally arrived in Germany.”
On Thursday Merkel rebuffed such rhetoric. “I think it arrived some time ago already,” she said, citing previous attacks on US soldiers at Frankfurt airport and an attack on a policeman in Hanover, both of which are believed to have had Islamic extremist motives.
“We are facing a huge test – that applies to Germany as well as to Europe,” she said, making repeated reference to the recent attacks in France, as well as incidents of deadly violence in Belgium, Turkey and the US state of Florida.
“Taboos of civilisation are being broken,” she said. “These acts happened in places where any of us could have been.”